


Trapped

by entropy25



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Adorable FitzSimmons, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Spoilers, Angst and Humor, F/M, Fitzsimmons Week, Jemma POV, Romance, monkey pyjamas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-07
Updated: 2014-12-07
Packaged: 2018-02-28 12:21:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2732330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/entropy25/pseuds/entropy25
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“The universe seemed to have it out for Leo Fitz and Jemma Simmons. Which was disappointing, because Jemma really, really liked the universe.” </p><p>After entering the alien city, FitzSimmons find themselves trapped and separated from the team. In spite of everything, they finally have the conversation they’ve been dancing around for weeks. Takes place immediately after “Ye Who Enter Here”. (Really, I’m just hoping that all of the following actually happens in the winter finale). One-shot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trapped

**Author's Note:**

> Set after "Ye Who Enter Here". Will probably be non-canon after Tues., Dec. 9, 2014 but hey...here's hoping.

Once again, they were trapped.

It didn’t seem fair. Really. A person should only ever have to be trapped in a small space with a dwindling oxygen supply and limited escape options once in their lifetime. But there they were, deep in an alien city hidden beneath San Juan, trapped in a small space with a dwindling oxygen supply and limited escape options. The universe seemed to have it out for Leo Fitz and Jemma Simmons. Which was disappointing, because Jemma really, really liked the universe.  

***

The alien city was a labyrinth and all of their tech was dead. They had found the temple, but no way in. Coulson, Bobbi, and Jemma (they had not found Mack, or whatever Mack had become) searched blindly through the tunnels surrounding the temple while Fitz tagged along behind them, trying to get any of their equipment to work. They had hit another dead end and were getting ready to turn around when a high-pitched noise caused them all to wince and freeze in their tracks. Coulson, Bobbi, Jemma, and Fitz looked around in alarm as a faint, glowing blue light permeated the tunnel. Fitz, his face illuminated by the mysterious blue light, looked down at the dead monitoring equipment he was carrying, puzzled. Then the light abruptly disappeared and the high-pitched sound turned into a veritable roar. The walls trembled and ugly, gaping cracks began to appear in the rough stone above them.

Then the ceiling caved in.

Coulson yanked Bobbi away from a shower of stone and the two of them stumbled backwards, away from Jemma and Fitz. Fitz dropped his equipment and pulled Jemma towards him, wrapping his arms around her as if somehow he could protect her from the shower of ancient alien stone with his body. Jemma screamed and turned her face into his shoulder as if he could. There was quite a lot of noise and confusion, and then abruptly, nothing.

Jemma’s eyes were squeezed tightly shut. It was silent except for the sound of her heart thudding in her ears. Fitz still had his arms wrapped around her and she could feel his heart thumping away too – _lub dub, lub dub_ \- valves opening and snapping shut. She dared to open one eye. He was staring over her head, looking grim.

“Well,” he said darkly. “This is eerily familiar.”

Jemma opened both eyes and turned to look. The ceiling had caved in. There was a massive wall of crumbled stone in front of them, blocking their path. The tunnel ended with a smooth wall of stone behind them, the dead end that they’d been trying to navigate around when the city had decided to collapse in on itself.

They were trapped.

Jemma took a shaky step forward.  “Bobbi?” she called out. “Sir?”

“FitzSimmons!” came Coulson’s muffled voice on the other side of the rock pile. “You all right?”

Jemma glanced over at Fitz, who was covered from head to toe in a fine, beige dust but seemed otherwise intact. He was walking along the wall of broken stone, inspecting it and mumbling to himself.

“We’re fine,” Jemma called back. “You?”

“No broken bones,” Coulson said cheerfully. “We should be able to get out the way we came.”

“Do you think you could get back through to this side?” Bobbi called out.

“The way it collapsed,” Fitz interrupted. “Structural integrity…” he trailed off and muttered something to himself.

There was a pause. “I’ll take that as a no?” came Bobbi’s reply.

“We’ll figure something out,” said Jemma. “What _was_ that?”

 “Well, you know how we were trying to figure out a way to open the temple?” said Coulson.

“Yes…?”

“I think someone else just figured out a way to open the temple.”

Jemma’s heart sunk. “Hydra?”

“Just hang tight,” Coulson said breezily. “We’ll find a way around, maybe get through the other side.”

Bobbi and Coulson began speaking in low voices, too muffled to hear clearly, and then there were several scraping and thudding sounds as they presumably made their way down the tunnel, back the way they came.

Jemma turned to Fitz. Despite the numerous other pressing problems that her brain should have been trying to solve, an absurd little part of her was trying to sort out if he had let go of her earlier or if she had broken away from him.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“We could…” Fitz gestured vaguely at the wall and then shook his head. “No, it’s not…but maybe if we had…okay. What do we have with us?” He shrugged off the black backpack he had been wearing and started rummaging through its contents, muttering under his breath. “Tech for the dwarves, but no dwarves. Also, no tech come to think of it…electronics are dead. The uh…what’s it called…and the night vision goggles, flares, water…” He tossed a water bottle at her without looking up.

Jemma caught it. “Fitz, did you hear me? I said are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” he said impatiently. “Listen, do you have a….if we could create a contained explosion…”

“Fitz,” she said gently, walking over to him. “You’re right, we’ll risk triggering another cave-in if we try to get through the wall.”

“Not that wall,” he said, pointing to the crumbled rocks in front of them. He spun around and pointed to the dead end behind them. “That one.”

Jemma stared at it, her mind racing. “If we could…”

“...depending on the thickness of the wall,” Fitz continued, still rummaging through the backpack.

“It could technically trigger another - ”

“ – not if we had something to brace - ”

“ – but there’s nothing in that backpack that would possibly - ”

“ – be big enough,” he finished. He sighed in frustration and dropped the backpack, sliding to the ground. “Right.”

They both seemed to realize at the same time that they had fallen back in sync, finishing each other’s sentences again. Despite the despondency of their situation, Jemma couldn’t help but feel a flutter of hope. Their eyes met. He looked away.

“What do you think happened?” Jemma asked, wanting the moment to last, to be like it was before.

Fitz shrugged. “Maybe Hydra did find it.”

“But how did they get here so soon after us? _And_ manage to find a way into the temple?”

Fitz didn’t reply for a moment, staring into space. “Mack might be out there still,” he said worriedly. “Hope they don’t…” He trailed off.

“Fitz,” Jemma said gently, sitting down cross-legged on the ground next to him. “Mack’s…”

“No,” he said sharply. “It’s still him. We have to…have to believe that.”

He looked up at her, and she felt a tightening in her chest. It was that look - that same look from earlier, from that terrible conversation on the plane.  His eyes bored into her, filled with hurt and disappointment and something else she couldn’t place.

“We can’t give up on people,” Fitz said, those eyes fixed on her.

They certainly had time. They could have a proper conversation. She could finally explain everything. But instead of staying calm and collected and reciting the speech she had carefully prepared in her head, Jemma felt the tide of hurt and anger and frustration well up in her again. Her cheeks flushed and she felt a stinging in her eyes.

“Fitz, I _never_ gave up on you.”

“You left.”

“I left _because_ I refused to give up on you!” Jemma cried out. “Do you have any idea how hard that was?”

“Please,” he shot back. “How was you leaving supposed to make me any better? Do you know….do you know what I…when you left, I…” He gestured vaguely in the direction of his shoulder. Then he closed his eyes and sighed heavily, clenching his jaw.

“But you _got_ better, didn’t you?” Jemma countered. “Look at you, Fitz…when I left you could barely string two sentences together. Your fine motor skills were completely shot, and everything I tried…all the exercises I was trying to do to help you…you just got frustrated. Every time, I could tell that you…” She was searching for the words, the right ones so as not to hurt his feelings. Or bring up anything she wasn’t ready to.

Jemma took a deep breath. “You weren’t getting better because you didn’t want to try and fail…in front of _me_ ,” she said quietly. “And I know that because…well, I would never want to fail in front of _you_.”

Fitz said nothing for a long while. Jemma’s heart was thudding away in her chest again, sending precious oxygen speeding through her cardiovascular system just because she felt nervous. They were beginning to tread dangerous ground. She wanted him to understand why she left, to understand that she still valued him, respected him, saw him as a partner. But the other thing…she didn’t think she was ready yet. That conversation with Bobbi still echoed through her thoughts.

_“But is the ride worth it?”_

_“I’ll let you know when it’s over.”_

Fitz took a deep breath and broke the silence. “It was hard. You used to look at me like…like I was the most important person in the room. And then those first few weeks after, when I got out of hospital, you looked at me like a…like an invalid.”

“Fitz! I never - ”

“I know you didn’t mean to,” he interrupted. “But you did. You still do, sometimes. Even now. And you’re right. I didn’t want to…don’t want to be like that in front of you.” He closed his eyes again. “Still, you didn’t have to _go_. And you lied. You went on a bloody secret undercover Hydra-infiltrating mission. And not even a proper goodbye.”

“I wasn’t supposed to - ”

“You could have been killed.”

“But the mission…no one knew,” Jemma tried to explain.

“Well, you should have told _me_.”

Jemma almost went on a tirade about the importance of classified missions and how Coulson had told her in her briefing that secrecy was essential and how following S.H.I.E.L.D. directives – no, the Director’s _explicit instructions_ \- was incredibly important in order to preserve the integrity of the fragile remnants of their organization…but she didn’t. Because he was right.

“You’re right,” she said in a small voice. Fitz looked surprised. He had probably been expecting the tirade. “You’re my best friend in the world and - ”

His face suddenly darkened. “Oh, _don’t_ make me say it again,” he snapped. “There’s no oxygen tank in here, I can’t very well make a declaration of love and nobly sacrifice myself for you this time.”

He froze, wide-eyed, as if he couldn’t believe the words that had come out of his own mouth. She froze too. They stared at each other, sitting cross-legged on the ground in the ruins of an alien city.

“Fitz…” she began without even knowing how she would finish.

“No,” he said quickly. “No, I’m sorry - ”

“I’ve - ”

“I - I shouldn’t have brought it up - ”

“Fitz, I - ”

“Look, I know that you don’t feel the same way and - ”

“ _Leo_ ,” Jemma interjected. He stopped mid-sentence. The times in which she had used his first name could be counted on one hand. Jemma’s heart was pounding so wildly she was probably arrhythmic.

“You didn’t even ask me if I do,” she said softly.

He stared at her.

There was suddenly a rumbling sound and the earth shook again. Fitz threw himself on top of her as everything turned to chaos. An ear-splitting explosion. A blast of heat and then a rush of air. Tumbling rocks and dust raining down on them. Fitz’s body, warm on top of hers. His chest, mercifully, still rising and falling.

When it had all stopped, she opened her eyes and looked up at him. Fitz stared back, his eyes different now, and she was fairly sure that they understood each other. Then he got up, reached out a hand, and pulled her to her feet. They both turned to see a gaping hole in the back wall, the one that had been a dead end. Then a blessed sight emerged from the dust and rock – Melinda May.

Jemma sighed in relief and smiled. “Oh good,” she said too loudly, over the ringing in her ears. “The cavalry is here.”

***

After everything – the temple, the Diviner, the terrible things they saw and the terrible things that they knew were to come – weeks and weeks passed before anything resembling normalcy was possible. Fitz and Simmons joined forces again in the lab, working frantically at first to stabilize Mack and patch up the rest of the team, and then later on trying to understand what they had found in that temple.

There was no talk of Fitz going to the garage now, no thought of it. They fell back into their old routine. They worked. They bickered. They handed tools and equipment to each other without having to be asked for it. Jemma finally felt whole again. They never spoke about the thing that she had said right before May had shown up and everything had gone to hell…but Jemma knew that Fitz understood her now, that he was giving her time. There wasn’t a lot of time, of course; they worked around the clock in the lab. Whenever she did leave for a few hours of sleep, Jemma often ended up just staring at the ceiling in her bunk instead, trying to work through other things. She thought about Skye and what she had gone through, and Skye’s father, and what Ward had done – the bad and the good - and that alien tech, and its terrible possibilities.

One night, weeks after the temple, she woke up covered in sweat and gasping for air. She often had nightmares about being trapped at the bottom of the ocean. But this time the nightmare had been a terrible combination of what had happened in the med pod and what had happened in the temple. She and Fitz had been in the temple, trapped between a wall of crumbled stone and a dead end, but for some reason the space was filling with water and he was urging her to take the last tank of oxygen again. _“You’re more than that, Jemma…”_ And she had wanted to tell him that he was, too, but the water had suddenly rushed in and filled her lungs and she had not been able to breathe.

She sat up in bed, swinging her legs over the side, and took a few deep breaths to calm herself. Then she got up, wrapped herself in a robe, and padded down to the kitchen. As she approached the kitchen she could see that the lights were on. She briefly considered going back to her bunk – her eyes were probably puffy with sleep, and she knew that her hair was a mess – but something made her go in anyway.

Fitz was sitting at the table, wearing his monkey pyjama bottoms and a worn _S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy of Science and Technology_ T-shirt. He had a mug of tea in front of him. There was another steaming mug at the opposite end of the table. He looked up and smiled at her, gesturing to the waiting mug.

“I couldn’t sleep, either,” he said.

She should have felt surprised – that he had known she was up, that he had known she would come to the kitchen – but she didn’t. They were back in sync.

She sat down at the table and they drank their tea in companionable silence. After a few moments, Fitz cleared his throat and said, nervously, “So…do you?”

He asked as if they hadn’t been working together day in and day out for the past few weeks, side-by-side, talking in rapid fire science jargon and finishing one another’s sentences.

“Feel the same way?” he added, although he didn’t have to. She had known what he was asking.

“Those nine days you were in a coma were the worst nine days of my life,” Jemma said in a rush, unable to stop the flood of words from pouring out. “And I hated not seeing you and then not speaking to you and now these last few weeks have just been so _right_ , and you risked your life for me, and you made me tea, and I can’t believe you still have those ridiculous monkey pyjamas.” She took a deep breath. “So…yes. Obviously.”

His smile was brilliant, the smile that she had missed, desperately, for nine long days while he was in that coma and for the many months of pain and struggle and misunderstanding that had followed.

They finished their tea, and then he shyly took her by the hand and they both went back to her bunk.

The ride was definitely worth it.


End file.
